"Aw, shet up," returned Hat. "I guess seekin' the Lord nights is jes as good as huntin' foxes anyway. You don't need to hand out no lip."
They walked across fields to the Patton home, each carrying a lantern, for there was no moon. The night was warm and sweet with the smells of summer. Blackberry bushes reached sharp tentacles out of the dark and made Hat gather her precious dress more closely about her.
"I wisht the meetin's was held anywheres but at Patton's place," she fretted. "It's so durn hard to git to, an' when you git there it's so lonesome lookin' it seems like it's hanted. The old folks all says it's hanted. It gives me the chills."
They crossed one creek on a plank and another on a log. Hat's great bulk teetered uneasily on the log and she thought of her clean dress and white stockings.
"Durn hard place to git to," she muttered.
The light wind was balmy and full of woodsy fragrance. In one place a whiff from a flowering alfalfa field came to them on the warm air heavy and sweet.
In a corner of a pasture their footsteps startled some sheep invisible in the darkness. A shivery sound of the movement of many soft bodies and then the patter of innumerable small feet told them that the sheep had scampered away. A few who had become separated from the main flock bleated inquiringly. The others answered: "This way, sisters, this way."
Judith felt strangely stirred and elated. It was an adventure, this coming out into the warm, soft, fragrant night. She thrilled to hear the sheep pattering away into the darkness calling to each other.
A rough wagon track down the side of a steep hill covered with brush and stunted trees brought them to the clearing about the Patton house. It was a tall old house built of heavy logs that had once been whitewashed. It rose corpselike in the dim light of the stars. Small dark windows piercing the thickness of the logs looked out from the pallid walls like eyes.
The house was hemmed in on every side. On the north, from which they had approached it, the hill rose abruptly. East and west the woods crept almost to the doors. On the south was Stony Creek, a torrent in winter, a wide, half dried up river bed in summer. Wagons to get to the place must either come down the steep hill or ford the river. The house was shaded by aged gray willows. Of evenings it was swathed in vapors from the river bed.